Posts Tagged ‘salmon’

When school started, I had this master plan. I was going to get up before school with enough time to work out (either run or go to the gym), walk the dogs, make coffee, shower, and pack breakfast. Then I’d go to school, be home by two, eat lunch, and start my homework.

I actually made the getting up happen, I’ll have you know, but it turns out I was sort of miserable. In order to get through everything, I had to get up before 6. In order to get up before six, I had to go to sleep before 10. I don’t mind getting up early, seriously. It makes you feel special – here I am all awake when everyone else is asleep. Things could happen, and everyone else would miss them! Things like… _____! (This is the mad libs portion of our post today). What I absolutely hate is going to sleep before 10. 11 o’clock was meant to be bedtime. That’s just the way it works. Fall starts in September and 11 o’clock is bedtime.

What I did not make happen was the doing the homework right after lunch. Turns out I can’t settle in to work until about 3:30. I always knew I had a mid-afternoon brain dead zone when I worked in an office – exists at home too.

New plan, instituted this week: Wake up with enough time to walk the dogs, make coffee, and pack breakfast. Go to school. Come home. Use the brain dead zone to work out. Eat lunch. Do homework. Make and eat dinner. Do more homework if absolutely necessary. Go to bed at the hour of a reasonable adult person.

Sure, there are issues. 1) Notice there is no time for blogging – homework will just have to go, I guess. 2) Some days that means I don’t eat lunch until like 3. Snacks have become a necessity, and I am not a good snacker. The only remaining solution is to drop out of school. Right? I made more of Heidi Swanson’s cheesy muffins for breakfasts, but yesterday I felt obligated to clean out leftovers. This is the chicken, sweet potato, and peach concoction from the weekend. All that sugar (albeit natural) made it a pretty reasonable breakfast, but I totally overestimated how much I’d eat. There’s a whole lotta sweet potato in that bowl, y’all. (Sometimes I eat leftovers after I would recommend that you eat leftovers. What can I say – I’m a risk taker.) The uneaten portion spent four hours in my car. Hey look! It’s the right side of my face! I forget why I took this – I think because I was wearing my professional TA shirt with no makeup, raggedy hair, and a big sorta stained hoodie. Do I know how to roll or what. After lunch I went to the gym and busted my ass, and then just about passed out on the way home. I had curried salmon rillettes in the fridge (from Around My French Table), but Crockett ate all my crackers so I had to eat it on english muffins. Bummer. We’re still getting all sorts of fun local produce from our produce delivery thingie. These are Chiogga beets – also called candy cane beets (I think). I roasted them in in quarters, because they were enormous. Also? Enormous portabello mushroom caps. (Linear algebra textbook from Crockett’s undergrad days shown for scale.) All together – roasted beet and arugula salad with feta, balsamic vinaigrette, and broiled marinated mushrooms.

P.S. WordPress ate this post twice before allowing me to put it up. I have no idea what’s going on with the formatting. Sigh.

He’s staying with my mom, and I took a couple of hours off from schoolwork yesterday to hang out with them and my dad.

My little brother is a vegan and he wanted more to eat than french fries and dressingless salad, so we went to Chipotle. Did you know that they’re vegan friendly? Yeah, me neither. Good on ya, Chipotle.

Then, so that he’d have food to eat at my mom’s house (her fridge, like mine, is mostly full of yogurt and cottage cheese), we stopped by Whole Foods.

We did not buy this. We mostly pointed and laughed. It has prickly pear extract, which is all of sudden supposed to be good for hangovers, which led us to believe that ‘urban’ is code for ‘you drink too much’.

We also made a run to the liquor store.

Shockingly, we did not buy Stinky Gringo margaritas.

I mean, seriously?

After I worked for a few more hours, the whole clan came over to lounge in my backyard. Cloey and Maida were thrilled – apparently I’m just not exciting enough for them anymore.

We had all kinds of tasty beverages. I made Dad try Racer 5 IPA, because yum.

I made myself a peach margarita – 1.5 ounces silver tequila, 4 ounces Freshies margarita mix (fresh juices and real sugar – it’s the best alternative to mixing your own), and half a frozen peach, blended up tasty like and topped with sparkling water. My theory here was that by adding fruit and extra water, I was making it healthier, and could therefore drink more.

Today that seems like a less reasonable conclusion.

I made the brother a non-blended, non-peach, non-sparkling version.

Doesn’t he look like he thinks it’s poison?

We threw some salmon burgers (pre-made from Costco) and some frozen vegan burgers on the grill, and had ourselves a nice little dinner. My mom took a picture of me being a mayonaise unicorn. These are the kind of shenanigans you’re missing out if you’re not friends with me on facebook.

Fine. Hosea Rosenburg, the winner of Bravo’s Top Chef season 5, is no longer the chef of Jax Fish House in Boulder. He won and then moved on. For awhile he had a cart, called Streat Chefs - we saw them at our farmers market a couple of times, but I haven’t been keeping up.

Bygones.

(My girlfriend Laura just reminded me how that guy used to say ‘bygones’ in Ally McBeal, and I love it.)

Anyway, despite living 20 miles or fewer from Boulder my entire life, I had never been to Jax. And I sort of want to make out with Hosea. So… last night, Crockett and I went to Jax. They’re famous for fish. Fresh, delicious fish.

We had the gall to show up at 8:45, when most people are starting or halfway through dinner.

We had to wait. We killed 20 minutes at Urban Outfitters, but when Crockett ran out of grey button up shirts to try on and and I ran out of pint glasses with mustaches on the side to mock, we headed back to Jax. They had a narrow wall bar, so we had wine (me), a Sazerac (him), and some calamari.

Turns out The Empire calamari salad has spoiled me for all other calamari. I mean, it was good, but once you get used to eating calamari with greens it seems sort of greasy when you eat it by itself. The two sauces, mango chile and lime aioli, were super strong and damn tasty. I love it when something that purports to be spicy is actually spicy, which the mango chili sauce both did and was.

It was actually 9:30 when we made it to our table. 9:30, people. I would like to pass it off like ‘oh, yeah, eating at 9:30 is totally normal’, like we live in Manhattan or something, but we don’t. We live in Louisville, Colorado, and 9:30 is late to eat dinner.

If they hadn’t given us crayons, I probably would have eaten my own hands. Or, more likely, Crockett’s hands.

Crockett’s name isn’t actually Crockett, by the way. He has a thing about his real name and the internet.

Doesn’t he look handsome when he realizes that I’ve inscribed his aka on our tablecloth?

What? Heidi braids are the way to go when your hair isn’t super clean and you unexpectedly leave for dinner at 8 pm on a Friday night.

Also, there are names written on every brick in the restaurant. A) I don’t know if real people wrote them, B) I really want to install thin brick in our living room.

When we finally got around to eating, Crockett had grilled New England sea scallops with english pea and asparagus farotto and a warm mushroom vinagrette.

He adored it.

I have a hard time with scallops. When they’re done ‘properly’, I sometimes find them slimy. That was that case here. I do agree, though, that the farotto and sauce were amazing.

Yeah, biology is not my thing. I kind of thought they were big calcium sticks.

Moving on.

Yesterday the final picture that I posted for Wordless Wednesday was the oatmeal that I’d already eaten for breakfast. I try not to do that, because then everything gets all out of sync, and then everything is just a mess and a blah blah blah. I did do it though, and I’m not going to repost it, because that would be repetitive, and that TOO is a mess.

Anyway.

That oatmeal had grated apple in it, which was quite delicious. I strongly recommend it.

I was a cleany bo-beany yesterday too, so I stopped mid-morning to have a grapefruit. The one I had the other day was delicious, super sweet, and set a really high bar. This one was sort of a letdown. Just like the strawberries I had last week, come to think of it.

I’m starting to suspect that my local Albertsons might be pulling a fruit bait and switch.

When I got the grapefruit I also got one of those gigantic containers of Earthbound Farms Mixed Baby Greens.

I know that packaged greens are less fiscally reasonable, but I don’t wash salad. It’s a pain in the butt. So it’s expensive pre-washed salad or no salad at all for me.

Salad is good for you.

Full circle back to my salad yesterday.

Lunch: Costco salmon patty grilled on the tiny Foreman and some dressing I pulled from the fridge that I remembered after the first bite was awfully balsamicy and that’s why we didn’t finish it in the first place.

A girlfriend of mine saw the Empire deviled eggs yesterday, and sent me an IM saying that she was now in the mood for deviled eggs.

I agreed, so after lunch I boiled a couple up and set about making the eggs when I got hungry for dinner.

That’s when I discovered that I hadn’t in fact taken the eggs all the way to hard boiled. You’d think that having lived at 6000ish feet all my life, I would have gotten the hang of this by now, but no. No such luck.

I decided that since they were freshly made I was going to eat them anyway. I mashed the slightly squishy yolks up with some mayo and some red curry paste, a little salt and pepper, and I ate them alllll up.

Crockett’s dad was supposed to head home Monday night, but ice pellets in Chicago stopped him.

While it was a hassle for him, he did get to experience Crockett’s signature egg and avocado breakfast.

We after breakfast, we headed out on a little field trip and left the girls guarding Crockett’s house. See, while Crockett’s dad didn’t make it home to New York, his bag did. We went to Kohl’s to pick him up a couple of shirts and… you know, whatever else men need if they’re several days without their stuff.

While CD shopped, Crockett and I wandered around – something that can be dangerous the week before Christmas sales. The aisles were full of stocking stuffers, one of which seemed to be perfect for me and me alone.

I love Puppies.

I don’t know what such a video game might consist of, and I don’t have a game system to play it on, but since I do love puppies I carried it around with me all day.

Then we swung by Costco. It wasn’t as busy as I’d feared, and we got all kinds of samples and loaded up on Turkey day groceries. Please note the gigantic bag of celery (and ignore the 10 pound sack of sugar).

Most of the samples we saw went directly from the sample table to mah belleh, but this one made it’s way into my purse to be enjoyed when we got home. The wrapper was dark blue and I took a guess that it meant dark chocolate, but it was in fact stuffed with peanut butter. Wasn’t the end of the world.

I also bought a bag of salmon patties, what with the heart healthy fish fats. I put one on Crockett’s teeny Foreman grill and ate it with some mixed greens and a light Caesar dressing I found in the depths of Crockett’s fridge (before we packed all the groceries into it).

The Crockett and his dad went off to visit the rest of the Colorado branch of the family, and the girls and Monk and I settled in for literally hours of data mining homework. (Last homework for two days, thank goodness).

When the boys got home we cooked up some tamales and watched the Dancing with the Stars finale.